Afrocentrism is many things to many people,
from the insistent claims of Leonard Jeffries to the commercialism of
the mainstream media. In the last five years it has pushed its way into
the American consciousness, both as an academic movement and as an
attitude. Several years ago I watched Eddy Murphy as Akenaton, Iman as
Nfertiti, and Michael Jackson as a Trickster Imhotep in the music video
"Remember the Time." MTV had met Afrocentrism? At any rate, it
was an ambitious fantasy set in ancient Egypt for the delectation of
Black Americans and, perhaps, the consternation of Whites.

I, a professional Africanist, had remained largely removed from the
controversy surrounding Black nationalist historiography and,
especially, Afrocentrism. Not that I hadn't heard about clashes. Several
years ago, I could not help but be aware of charges of both racism and
anti-Semitism at Hillary Clinton's alma mater, Wellesley College.
Professor Tony Martin of the Africana Studies Department taught from
The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews, a book issued
by the Nation of Islam; it argued that Jews dominated the Atlantic slave
trade. Professor Mary Lefkowitz, a classicist, became one of Professor
Martin's chief critics. He in turn accused her of leading a "Jewish
onslaught." The president of the college became embroiled in an
argument over freedom of speech, a debate with national reverberations,
especially in a decade of supposedly deteriorating Black/Jewish
relations.

Several months ago I met the same Mary Lefkowitz, a pleasant low-keyed
woman with a scholarly face. In a course about Africa and the West, I
had invited her to speak. Lefkowitz, now author of Not Out of
Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History,
spoke in measured tones about the stories that many scholars, Black and
White, had spun about the connection between Egypt and Greece. The
student audience asked questions and probed the responses in the best
scholarly fashion. And that should have been that.

Now, in May of 1996, I found myself on a panel at Wellesley with the
opposing forces of Afrocentrism and anti-Afrocentrism. I had stepped
into the minefield that surrounds Afrocentrism, "Blackness"
and "political correctness" in the academy. The audience of
several hundred, crammed into a small science auditorium, was a sea of
black, brown and white faces. Some young, a few old, mostly female, they
seemed to resonate with the kind of intense interest seldom reserved for
ancient history. Indeed, I knew that they had not come for that, per se.
In the past several months Lefkowitz has become the doyenne of those who
wish to see the end of liberal "relativism" in the academy,
including many on the Right who see her as the opening wedge in a
crusade to cleanse the temples of learning of creeping multiculturalism.
Conservative pundits like George Will in Newsweek are using her
work as a cudgel to beat home certain ideas about standards, pedagogy
and race. Not since Martin Bernal's 1987 Black Athena: The
Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, which argued for the
African roots of Attic civilization, have so many nonspecialists gotten
into a lather about the sons and daughters of Hellen. The discussion has
little to do with Egyptology or classics; it does involve our deepest
feelings of who we are and the state of contemporary Black/White
relations.

Lefkowitz is a serious scholar. We also have essential points of
disagreement. She and I talked over lunch about the controversy surely
to follow on the heels of the publication of her book. Lefkowitz points
out that some Afrocentrists state that the ancient Greeks stole their
philosophy from Egypt. She maintains that any idea of an Egyptian "Mystery
System" is ultimately based on Greco-Roman sources which present
only a partial and late version of Egyptian practice and ritual. These
were worked up into a pseudohistorical pastiche in the early eighteenth
century by a French cleric and then given wide currency. Lefkowitz
argues that the Masons and certain twentieth century African American
writers mistakenly used this work to construct a vision of ancient
Egyptian religion and knowledge. However, she does not stop there. On
the basis of a very slender number of examples, she set out to demolish
what she construes to be "Afrocentrists" and to save young
people from their clutches. She explicitly states that her work is a
critique of "relativist" or "subjective" history
that attempts to vindicate the past of any particular groupin this
case Blacks. Indeed, her work has been partially funded by conservative
groups hoping to stem the tide of such scholarship. If her tormentors
have the Nation of Islam, Professor Lefkowitz has the Bradley and John
M.Olin Foundations.

Until the publication of Bernal's work in the
late 1980s, the White academic establishment took little notice of what
was emerging as "Afrocentrism." However, Black nationalist
historiography had already put down deep roots in the African American
community. In the nineteenth century writers like Edward Blyden and
Martin Delany pointed the way. In the twentieth century J. A. Rogers and
others emphasized the Black contributions to "High Cultures"
of the Old World, contributions which they argued had been for too long
denied. At the same time, religious groups, like the Moorish Science
Temple and, later, the Nation of Islam, created a completely alternative
cosmology and narrative for African Americans. This responded to the
predominant ideology of White supremacy and created a universal history
in which the North American racial hierarchy was turned on its head.
Blacks were the original people and whites were a devolution. The Civil
Rights movement of the 1960s and the following Black Power movement
increased the need for a broader new history. Works like Chancellor
Williams' The Destruction of Black Civilization and George
James' Stolen Legacy became focal texts. The Senegalese
historian Cheikh Anta Diop's works were translated into English; these
were taken up by many Black Studies departments and became part of the
alternative Black Studies canon.

Afrocentrists argue that Blacks must see
themselves through Black eyes, as agents of history, rather than as
simply subjects of investigation. Their view must proceed from an "inside
place." Most emphasize the civilizations of northeastern Africa,
namely Kemet (Egypt), Nubia, Axum, and Meroe. Early on it was truly a "Black
Thing," involving as it did its own conferences, publishing and
networks. By 1978 Jay Carruthers' Kemetic Institute was established in
Chicago. A year later a similar thematic course was taken by the
Institute of Pan-African Studies in Los Angeles. A meeting in that city
in 1984, the First Annual Ancient Egyptian Studies resulted in the
organization of the Association for the Study of Classical African
Civilizations. In the same year Ivan Van Sertima's Nile Valley
Civilization group held a major conference. His Journal of African
Civilization became a major diffusion point in the burgeoning corpus
of Afrocentric literature.

In spite of criticism (or maybe because of it), Afrocentrism (or
Afrocentricity) was and is spreading. Elementary schools in Atlanta,
Washington, D.C., and Detroit, as well as other locales, have initiated
new curricula, impelled largely by the demands of parents and students.
The African American Baseline Essays, created for the Portland, Oregon,
school system, have had a wide impact. Covering a number of disciplines,
ranging form history to mathematics, the essays attempt to topple the
perceived "Eurocentrism" of the pedagogical status quo. At the
same time, Afrocentrism has begun to make itself felt in higher
education. The largest Afrocentric program in the United States is
housed at Temple University in Philadelphia and has well-over one
hundred students under the chairmanship of Molefi Asante.

The African American Studies establishment has awakened to find itself
on the defensive and university administrators find their campuses being
visited by a stream of Afrocentric speakers invited in by the students.
In the early 1970s Orlando Patterson of Harvard, a Jamaican-born
sociologist, lambasted the incipient movement as emphasizing only "pageants,
pyramids and princes." Twenty years later Newsweek carried
a feature article on it; Afrocentrism was a menacing exotic growth
emanating from the bowels of urban America, rapping out a lyric of Black
primacy and rapping ancient history on the head. Many Whites and not a
few African Americans saw it as dangerous. In 1994 the Manhattan
Institute, a public policy forum, published Alternatives to
Afrocentrism, a collection of highly critical essays by, among
others, Lefkowitz, Gerald Early, Stanley Crouch, Wilson Moses, and Frank
Yurco. Early, an African American, has been especially vitriolic,
dismissing Afrocentrism as just another North American experiment in "group
therapy," intellectual fast food for his less sophisticated
brethren.

Lefkowitz says that her own combat with Afrocentrism began after a
visit to Wellesley in the early 1990s by the longtime Afrocentrist Yosef
Ben-Jochannan. Given this experience and subsequent ones, the Wellesley
professor advises: "University administrators ought to ask whether
we need courses in flat-earth theory  or Afrocentric ancient
history  even if someone is prepared to teach them." This
assumes an equivalence between flat earth theory and all Afrocentrism, a
simplistic assumption, at best. Some of Afrocentrism's detractors
connect it with everything from anti-Americanism to anti-Semitism. True,
among some of its proponents these elements are all too much in
evidence. Doctrines of "Sun People" and "Ice People"
have emerged that simply reverse the Manichean duality of the dominant
White mindset and spit it back. Melanism, "the doctrine
that this pigment confers superior intelligence on Blacks, has been
propounded, as have theories, too numerous to mention, which connect the
origin of Blacks with the Lost Continent of Mu or Muria,
a kind of sepia version of Atlantis. Indeed, like former Utopians, many
tendencies branch off and make the transition from the tired Profane
History of this world (and the political battles it calls for) to
millenarian Never Lands which exist outside the American racial
nightmare.

Many of Afrocentrism's critics have chosen to battle these straw men
(and women). However, "Afrocentrists do not want," according
to Asante, "to replace Greece with Egypt. They want a proper
recognition of African civilization." Afrocentrism "is not,
nor can it be based on biological determinism." The movement is
open to "anyone willing to submit to the discipline of learning the
concepts and methods. . . ." The question is not
whether or not Cleopatra was Black  Asante argues that she was not
 but about "a proper recognition of African civilization."
Maulana Karenga uses the term "Afrocentricity" to avoid any
perception that it has aims equivalent to the "Eurocentrism"
it seeks to replace. In seeking to delimit it, he has encouraged its
adherents to be autocritical. They must not "promote a static,
monolithic and unreal concept of African culture which denies or
diminishes its dynamic and diverse character." They must also not "overfocus
on the Continental African past at the expense of recognizing the
African American past and present as central to and constitutive of
African culture and the Afrocentric enterprise."

Afrocentrism attracts attention in a way that
new theories of the diffusion of the Indo-European languages do not.
Part of this is due to the fact that Afrocentrism lends itself to a
political vision. Many of its opponents, from Arthur Schlesinger to
Dinesh D'Souza, see it as the historiographical groundwork for Black
separatism. As it filters into the academy, it increasingly influences
young African Americans who will be the leaders of tomorrow. In
addition, as it filters into formerly white temples of learning, it
acquires legitimacy and funding which make it harder to uproot as time
progresses. To its myriad enemies, it, Hydra-like, seems to acquire new
heads and new strength. Some of these new heads are White and within the
Ivy League. Chief among them is Martin Bernal of Cornell. He argued that
until the eighteenth century Western Europeans had seen the origins of
Greek civilization in Egyptian and Phoenician colonization. In the
nineteenth century this "Ancient Model" was dropped in favor
of one which attributed the wellsprings of classical Greek civilization
to hardy (and quite White) northerners cascading down the Balkans.
Bernal labels this formulation the "Aryan Model." In it the
African and Semitic roots of the West could be blotted out. Racism and
anti-Semitism had triumphed, if only for a time.

Bernal's second volume of Black Athena was published in 1991
and it still causing fallout half-a-decade later. Indeed, cyberspace is
whizzing with e-mailed debates between the twin peaks of the (White)
debate on Afrocentrism. Lefkowitz and a colleague, Guy Rogers, have
added fuel to the fire by editing a rather ponderous tome entitled Black
Athena Revisited in which a wide variety of scholars hammer away at
Bernal's central theses. Much of it has been heard before; much of it
needs to be very seriously debated. Much of it is arcane and makes one
wonder why all the media hype surrounding arguments about people who
have been dead for at least twenty-five hundred years. For instance,
Frank Yurco, the Egyptologist, tackles Black Athena herself and holds
that Bernal's claim that the Hellenic goddess of wisdom sprang from an
Egyptian prototype, Neit, is nonsense. Yurco assures us, at one point,
that "H is a strongly voiced phoneme in Egypto-Coptic..[also] Greek
theta does not exist in Egypto-Coptic, but it would have to derive from
the final t in Egyptian Hwt." Not really the kind
of thing most people, even academics, discuss at parties. It is of even
less concern to the "Boyz in the Hood." So why now is this "hot
stuff"? Lefkowitz is invited to speak on National Public Radio and
is defended by George Will, but the recent discovery of the complex
relationship between the Germanic languages and the Slavic and Celtic
groups won't get five minutes or five pages in the media. The issue is
race. The present wrangles have two parts: the relationship between "Black"
Africa and Egypt, and the relationship between Egypt and Greece. The
first is primary; the issue of Egypt's relation to Greece only takes on
interest (and color) when the issue of who the ancient Egyptian actually
"were" comes into play.

The assertion that the Egyptians were "Black" raises
hackles. The three writers that deal with race in the Lefkowitz/Rogers
collection go to considerable lengths to prove that "Blacks,"
however defined, are not part of the story. Indeed, Glen Bowersock,
reviewing Not Out of Africa in the New York Times, had
already questioned "why Egyptian origins or influences should be
linked with Africans at all, except in the simple-minded geographical
sense." This is the heart of the matter. It has bedeviled Western
scholars for over one-hundred and fifty years and is still not resolved.
Although in the nineteenth century Sir Richard Burton referred to modern
Egyptians as "whitewashed niggers," and Sir Flinders Petrie
referred to their ancient ancestors as being of "course mulatto
stock," neither of these formulations serve to give an agreeable
pedigree to the precursors of Western civilization. Indeed, it was for
this reason that Giuseppe Sergi, an Italian anthropologist overcame the
problem in the 1880s by divining that the ancient Egyptians were dark 
sometimes very dark  Caucasians. He labeled his group Hamites and
placed them at the intersection of Africa and Asia. Later
anthropologists theorized a Hamitic or series of Hamitic languages. By
the 1920s the American anthropologist, C. G. Seligman, wrote that any
signs of "civilization" in Africa were the products of the
penetration of these incomparable bearers of culture. A few years later,
Alfred Rosenberg, chief Nazi Party ideologue, could confidently claim
Egypt's ruling class for Europe's peoples - and their Aryan branch at
that. By the 1960s, however, the "Hamitic Hypothesis" had
fallen from grace as the established orthodoxy. The linguist Joseph
Greenberg demonstrated that the "Hamitic" languages were a
chimera; no such unified group could be found. The people called "Hamites"
were found to belong to differing language families. As the linguistic
foundations for the hypothesis fell away, so too did the idea of a
conquering "Hamitic Race."

At least until Black Athena Revisited.
On the whole, the book hedges on the race issue. Guy Rogers says, in
summation that "It would be inaccurate to describe the ancient
Egyptians as either black or white; the population of ancient Egypt was
one of mixed pigmentation." The assertion is mild, but in the land
of Colin Powell it seems more disingenuous than myopic. We live in a
society of races, which few classicists have expressed any desire to
declassify. W. E. B. Du Bois was right when he said: "We cannot if
we are sane, divide the world into whites, yellows, and blacks, and then
call blacks white." He might have said that it would be equally as
strange to call them "Mediterranean," "Hamitic," or
a hundred other euphemisms. One assumes that these various authors in
Black Athena Revisited have seen, if not met, an African
American. And here lies the rub  the very catholicity of the term "Black"
in the North American context. The "social "construction of
race in America does not rely on skin color. "African Americans,"
as Asante notes, " constitute the most heterogeneous group in the
United States biologically, but perhaps one of the most homogeneous
socially." Hypodescent, the "One Drop Rule," has molded
and still molds discussions "Blackness." And, it is still
maintained. As Wilson Moses points out, "Even today, this .
. . reasoning remains the basis for classifying appreciable
numbers of people as 'black' despite their blue eyes and blond hair."
While Cheikh Anta Diop did argue for a West African phenotype for the
ancient Egyptians, leading Afrocentrists do not insist upon it. In fact
they are quiet explicit. Karenga notes that it "is . . .
playing Europe's racial game to concede that Egyptians are white
or Asian if they don't look like a Eurocentric version of a West
African." Furthermore, "Ethiopians and Somalis, perhaps,
resemble the ancient Egyptians and ancient Nubians more than any other
peoples and they are, even by Eurocentric standards, African."
Unless we revive the hoary "Hamitic" Myth, they are.

One need not argue that the ancestors of African Americans rafted to
the Americas on papyrus boats to make the Afrocentrists' point. The
issue is that if they had "Black" African ancestry, it
would clearly place them in a subordinate caste in the United States.
Or, as Wilson Moses has put it, "In fact many of the Pharaohs, if
transplanted across time and onto the Chattanooga Choo-Choo in 1945,
would have a hard time obtaining a Pullman berth or being seated in a
dining car." It might be pointed out that the ancient Egypt did not
see themselves as "Caucasoid" or "Negroid." The
issue of imposing our racial taxonomies on the ancient Egyptians is a
specious one. To call the Hittites or the Trocharians "Indo-Europeans"
is to impose terminology on peoples who never themselves used it. The
process of classifying and aggregating is well-known to most social
scientists  witness the evolution of the 1970s ethnic neologism "Hispanic."

For those anti-Afrocentrists truly concerned
with the Black in Black Athena, there is a way out. One
of the writers in the attack on Bernal has it. Not only were the ancient
Egyptians not Black, their nearest relatives are Europeans: "It is
obvious that both the Predynastic and Late Dynastic Egyptians are more
closely related to the European cluster than they are to any of the
other major regional clusters in the world." In one fell swoop, he
drives a stake through the heart of Bernal's argument, those of the
Afrocentrists, and not a few Africanists. Relying on skulls, but not
blood groupings or DNA, Loring Brace, an anthropologist at the
University of Michigan, tells us that heads do talk and that the ancient
Egyptians were closer, at least head-wise, to Germans and Danes than
they were to Somalis, Ethiopians, Nubians or Berbers. He dismisses the
term "race" and then revives it cleverly disguised within the
term "cluster." There are several of these; the two of most
interest to him just happen to be the "European" and the "African."
And the Egyptians definitely belong with the former. Brace' s article is
by far the longest and most detailed of the three in the book that deal
with specifically with race. It would also vindicate much late
nineteenth century racial thought on the "Egyptian Question."

One of the authors in Black Athena Revisited, Kathryn Bard,
does note that some craniometry is pretty old-fashioned. The dean of
African-American classicists, Frank Snowden, in his contribution,
advises Afrocentrists to give up Egypt and focus on Nubia as the first
great Black civilization. Brace's contribution, far more radical than it
seems at first glance, would deny even this concession. Nubians, like
the Egyptians, are not part of the African head cluster. Brace's
argument is admittedly clever, for it avoids any claims that might arise
based on the American "One Drop Rule." The Egyptians and their
neighbors to the south in Nubia and the Horn are, according to a series
of impressive cranial geneologies, adaptations to climate. And the
African "cluster" is not in the mix; the ancient Egyptians
were people with European skulls whose epidermises gradually adapted to
the rigors of a subtropical sun.

Of course, Dr. Brace is not the final word. The field of physical
anthropology has progressed somewhat beyond the phrenology and
craniometry of the nineteenth century. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, to
many the present authority in the field, has said that we must look to
gene frequencies, blood groupings and a host of other data before we
construct our "racial" genealogies. Homo sapiens has
had the annoying habit of being able to interbreed; unlike Brace,
Cavalli-Sforza believes that the population of the Horn of Africa is
clearly the result of a fusion of black African and non-African
elements. The Italian geneticist, a former Princeton professor and one
of the authors of the Human Genome Project, is hardly a radical in
matters racial. At the same time, he, more than some of his American
confrerès, is willing to admit to the infinite variety of human
experience and the human hybridity that may have been the past of the
race and which may be its future.

Where "race" has been legally
enforced for over nine generations, we must take it, however socially
constructed, very seriously. And here is the both the hope and the
warning. Lefkowitz, the scholar, acknowledges that "If you go by
the American 'one-drop rule,' the Egyptians would be black." In
spite of any craniofacial legerdemain, the Egyptians and their neighbors
to the south were "people of color." Hopefully, the sterile
debate on whether Northeastern Africa was really within or without
Africa will soon be closed. In the late 1980s an Ethiopian student,
Mulugeta Seraw, was stomped to death by a group of skinheads in
Portland, Oregon. They crushed his skull. Dr. Brace's measurements were
irrelevant.

Copyright 1996 by Ibrahim Sundiata.
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